Weighing potential of smaller, more plentiful satellites

In Washington nobody likes to talk about the “s-word” but as March 1, the deadline for the across-the-board budget cuts grows closer, conversations about sequestration are becoming all-consuming. “It is just occupying everyone's time,” says Pentagon industrial base chief Brett Lambert. Unless lawmakers pass a new agreement by the end of the month, $85 billion in across-the-board budget reductions will take place for fiscal 2013. It is the first increment in a 10-year, nearly $1 trillion package of spending cuts.

Selling data from a piggyback payload

NASA's open-ended space technology push is receiving a bureaucratic boost with the creation of a new Space Technology Mission Directorate at the agency's Washington headquarters, joining Aeronautics, Human Exploration and Operations and Science as associate-administrator-level organizations. The new Space Technology associate administrator will be Michael Gazarik (at left in this photo with Deputy Administrator Lori Garver at Aurora Flight Sciences), formerly director of the Space Technology Program in the Office of the Chief Technologist.

Orbital Sciences Corp. hopes to launch its first Antares rocket next month, paving the way for a second commercial cargo service to the International Space Station (ISS) by summer. The plan assumes a successful on-pad hot-fire test of the liquid-fueled Ukrainian-built rocket, but it will not be delayed by inconclusive results from a NASA probe into the cause of a fairing-separation problem that destroyed the $388 million Glory atmospheric-research mission in 2011.

President Obama's crusade to increase a small sliver of taxes on the nation's wealthiest has long capitalized on a convenient symbol of privilege: the corporate jet. Those talking points are landing like stray arrows on the makers of business jets, and manufacturers are fuming.

When we need brake pads or a fuel pump for our automobile, we assume the garage will have one in stock or know where to get it. But at the dawn of the automobile age, when this Daimler car was new, it wasn't that simple. Every automobile was essentially a one-off, custom-built as a worldwide cadre of tinkerers and engineers struggled to invent an industry. A few years later, the same held true as the aviation industry was born.

Rattled by cold California high-desert winds, and little changed since its days as a Second World War motor pool for the U.S. Marine Corps, the old hangar that Masten Space Systems calls home seems an incongruous incubator for low-cost flights to sub-orbit.